Well it would seem mr Meanie has all but left the Z community for good so I gave up on waiting for a fixed-up pdaXii13, took the plunge and followed zdevils deceptively brief guide to installing Debian EABI- never did get wifi working under the latest ii13. It took me about 8 hours in the end to get most stuff set up I need. First impressions of EABI are good- it works much better than the last versions of OZ/Angstrom I tried on the c3xxx, it resumes much faster than pdaXii13 does but to me it doesn't seem quite as nippy as pdaXii13 (which I'd put down to the larger memory footprint of running full Debian) and the tarball linked in zdevils guide certainly requires a lot more configuring than pdaX if not as much as Titchy or Debian from scratch would. The best bit is knowing I can now apt-get over 23k packages or whatever its up to now!

I've read zdevil is working on a more refined tarball image with many more customisations and tweaks, so I eagerly await that but in the mean time I've encountered a few issues that some of you may have already solved:

1 - Can I get the matchbox-card-applet or something similar for the icewm panel? If not then just getting vfat(/fat) cf/sd cards to auto-mount would be good enough.

2 - Screen/power settings? At the moment when I shut the Zaurus lid, it does nothing ie the screen stays on and it doesn't suspend. I'd like it to go into suspend mode when I shut the screen if poss. Also, can I get an applet for icewm to blank the screen when I'm just using the Z for music playback , again similiar to the matchbox tool under pdaX?

3 - Under pdaXii13, I just had to uninstall the scim packages and that would cut the load time of gnumeric from about 30+ secs to around 6 seconds! scim doesn't seem to be installed presently but I was wondering if anyone could think of some packages I could remove or any other tweaks that may get me a gnumeric loading time that competes with the pdaX one?

4 - How do I overclock to 624Mhz (for when I'm compiling mainly)?

5- Not tried playing any vids yet, whats the best mplayer command for playing a 320x240 (avi) vid under Debian EABI?

Thanks to zdevil for the guide and thanks to all those who can help my improve my Z/Deb experience!